December 8, 2007 – 12:32 am
It should come as no surprise that Christopher Hitchens had something to say about Mitt Romney’s speech last night. From his latest piece in Slate, a sample: Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s Declaration may invoke […]
December 7, 2007 – 1:26 pm
Well, we’re all still drying off after our dousing last night from Mitt Romney’s Gatorade barrel of holy water. Like JFK in 1960, Romney saw that his campaign was imperiled by a controversial religious affiliation; in this case, however, the risk was not that he was afraid of being seen as some sort of religious […]
December 2, 2007 – 11:46 pm
Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam […]
November 25, 2007 – 12:49 am
About two weeks ago, I posted a little item called The Teflon God, about the highly evolved and adaptive unfalsifiability of religious “memeplexes”, in response to an item by William Vallicella. My post attracted the notice of Dennis Mangan, proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, and he commented on it in a post of his own, which […]
November 14, 2007 – 1:06 am
Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by […]
November 13, 2007 – 12:32 am
The battle rages unabated between the pious and the heathens. Here’s tonight’s salvo: All things dull and ugly, All creatures short and squat, All things rude and nasty, The Lord God made the lot; Each little snake that poisons, Each little wasp that stings, He made their brutish venom, He made their horrid wings. […]
November 12, 2007 – 1:46 am
I apologize for the sloppy editing of yesterday’s post. I try to be careful, but it is in the nature of daily blogging that occasionally one’s vigilance will waver, and poorly proofread material will go into print. The post contained both a repeated passage and a mistaken double negative, both of which have been corrected. […]
November 11, 2007 – 12:10 am
As you know, the debate between theists and a-theists is heating up a bit lately. (That we can even have such a debate is a healthy trend, considering that in earlier days such disputes were resolved by burning the nonbeliever at the stake.) There will, of course, be no resolution of it, as theists make […]
November 7, 2007 – 12:59 am
The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.
November 6, 2007 – 12:54 am
Given that I have arranged to sell off most of each day to a medium-sized international corporation, leaving me in possession of only a few meager hours each evening in which to pursue my own diverse interests, I find myself, as does anyone whose assets are insufficient to satisfy his needs, having to scrimp and […]
October 31, 2007 – 11:31 pm
From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his […]
October 28, 2007 – 11:34 pm
I’ve just watched the debate I mentioned a few days ago: between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the topic Is Christianity The Problem? It was as interesting as I had expected; these are two sharp minds.
October 24, 2007 – 10:31 pm
On Monday evening Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza squared off for a debate at The Ethical Culture Society’s Manhattan auditorium; the topic was “Is Christianity the Problem?” I first heard about it from my friend The Stiletto, who sent me a link to an item by D’Souza announcing the event.
October 23, 2007 – 12:00 am
In a recent post at his Maverick Philosopher website, Bill Vallicella responds to the following brief remark by philosopher Jim Ryan: The reason I’m an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn’t the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly […]
October 17, 2007 – 9:45 pm
As I was poking around at the newly added Policeman’s Blog (see our previous post), I came across an item that featured the video below, in which we learn how a proper Musselman is expected to treat the ladies.
October 16, 2007 – 12:41 am
I’ve just read Sam Harris’s Letter To A Christian Nation. It is brief — one can finish it in an hour or so — but pungent.
October 1, 2007 – 11:12 pm
Well, it looks like John McCain is done. I don’t suppose that he had much of a shot at the Republican nomination anyway, but now he’s being roasted alive for some candid remarks he made during an interview at Beliefnet.org. What was McCain’s unpardonable offense? Being a Christian himself, he expressed a wish to have […]
October 1, 2007 – 12:10 pm
Since 9/11, there has been a steady drone of voices from the Left asking “why do they hate us?” ((No, it’s not for the reason this wag suggests.)), and supplying, lest we might be tempted to assign any blame whatsoever to our enemies, a litany of reasons why U.S. influence in the world is toxic […]
September 25, 2007 – 11:10 pm
We note with considerable interest the goings-on in Burma these days, where the military junta that runs the country — one of the most repressive governments in the world today — is finding itself in a bit of a cleft stick as Buddhist monks are waging an ever-bolder campaign of civil disobedience. Were any other […]
September 12, 2007 – 11:39 pm
Here is some interesting reading for you all, courtesy of Edge.org. First up is an essay called Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, in which he takes the “new atheists” to task for failing to develop a subtle enough appreciation of the adaptive underpinnings of religion, and of morality. He draws […]
September 8, 2007 – 10:17 pm
In last night’s post I tried to make clear that disbelief in God need not be correlated with the sort of spritual tone-deafness that Dr. William Vallicella argued for in a recent essay.
September 7, 2007 – 11:55 pm
We have just passed the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa, and much is being made of letters, recently publicized, that indicate that she had grave doubts about the existence of God, and was deeply tormented by her own lack of faith.
August 28, 2007 – 1:18 pm
In a rather heated post a little while back, I railed against the notion that a merciful God would permit suffering such as that of little Abigail Taylor, the six-year-old girl who was recently disemboweled in a horrifying accident. The universal, reciprocal cruelty of the natural world also offers bountiful evidence that even if some […]
August 26, 2007 – 8:37 pm
With a hat tip to our friend the Big Hominid, we direct you to a remarkable video clip, of the apostate Muslim gadfly Wafa Sultan engaging in a heated debate on al-Jazeera television. Sultan characterizes the struggle between jihadis and the West: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of […]
August 13, 2007 – 10:39 am
A reader who calls himself William has left an extensive comment on our recent post about the Korean hostages, in which he left quite a list of relevant links, prefaced by the follwing remarks: Hi, I’m also trying to learn what on earth these Koreans have got themselves into. Without passing any judgment on the […]
I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled […]
In Peter Berkowitz’s response to Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great, he make some worthwhile points, but also trots out some familiar and flimsy ones as well. Let’s have a go at those first; we’ll take up his better arguments — and he does indeed make some — in a subsequent post.
In today’s Wall Street Journal is an essay aimed at the advancing ranks of atheist authors. The names mentioned are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, but the brunt of the artillery is directed at Mr. Hitchens (who is evidently a friend of the author, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of […]
It is a poorly kept secret that I am deeply skeptical of religious beliefs and institutions. The empirical question of whether their net effect is a boon or a blight upon our wretched species is, one could conceivably argue, still an open one, and I do acknowledge that religion provides a harmless existential anodyne for […]
More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.
I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants. Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God […]
I am going to have to stop reading the news one of these days, I think. What it brings me, day in and day out, is a bitter harvest of suffering and misery, gathered from all the world over, and it is getting to be more than I can bear.
A little while ago we opined that, odd as it may seem, here in America the particulars of a politician’s faith matter less than that he have some sort of religious affiliation. Quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney seems to agree: I think the American people want a person of faith to lead […]
Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are […]
The prominent Swiss Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan is a controversial figure: to some, he is an important moderate voice, one that could do much to heal the deepening rift between Islamic and Western culture, while to others his call for an assimilable, Europeanized form of Islam masks a more radical agenda that is closer to […]
The New York Public Library recently hosted a debate between The Reverend Al Sharpton and the journalist, author and gadfly Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, in case you hadn’t heard, has recently mounted the increasingly crowded atheist soapbox — joining, most prominently, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett — with his book God Is Not Great: […]
Here’s an addendum to our previous post (which was in turn a comment upon a recent post, at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website, about atheism and morality).
Dr. William Vallicella, in a recent post, considers the following quote from the atheist author Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 38-39): If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. […]
We note that Jerry Falwell, the prominent religious extremist, sanctimonious prig, and bigot, has died. This is the man who, on September 13th, 2001, said: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, […]
With a tip of the waka waka waka tam o’shanter to our old friend Jess Kaplan, we have further evidence of the beneficial effect of religion upon the world. Today the spotlight is on one Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who in a sermon on Friday offered an inspiring example […]
My friend Jess Kaplan calls our attention to an extremely disturbing development: schools in the UK are now avoiding the subject of the Holocaust in their history curricula in order to avoid offending Muslim students, whose social and religious programming often includes Holocaust denial.
There might be interesting times ahead for homosexual Jewish biology professors in South Carolina. Have a look here. (A tip of the hat to BV.)